She Said the Hard Part Is Asking the Right Questions: Understanding Near Kin Marriage in Late Medieval England

Mysteries abound in late medieval English legal history. One of the most interesting concerns the law of marriage, an area I began to study at Cornell University in 1973 under my undergraduate adviser Mary Beth Norton. Strangely, the medieval church required only affection and commitment freely expressed to make a valid marriage. Vows, parental blessings, or witnesses were not necessary. Marriages could be contracted in complete secret. They might be revealed later to the consternation of families. They could remain hidden for the lives of the parties, or until one person wanted to win release from their vows. Ecclesiastical court records indicate that clandestine unions involved nearly ninety percent of the cases on medieval marriage.

            Why did the church support such a chaotic system?  My current research sheds light on the question. It now appears that the church condoned and even supported private unions because elites wanted them. Under the auspices of the church the nobility had fashioned a system that allowed them to practice bigamy. People married for a second time during the life of a living spouse for a variety of reasons involving both sentiment and political gain. 

            In the case of the house of York, it now appears that Elizabeth Woodville, the gentry-born woman whose marriage to a king shocked her contemporaries, had a more illustrious heritage than historians have realized. Her biological father was Edmund Beaufort duke of Somerset, a scion of the house of Lancaster. The marriage of Elizabeth and Edward IV in 1464 was therefore not merely a love match, but also an early effort to end the blood feud between Lancaster and York. My discovery can do much to explain opposition to the marriage by the Yorkists Richard earl of Warwick, George duke of Clarence, and Richard duke of Gloucester (later Richard III).